John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies :: Harvard University

In the week since Israelis went to the polls, the operative word in the media seems to be “inconclusive,” based on the near-tie between the two largest parties and the prospect of bone-wearying bargaining before a government emerges. Both observations are true, but nevertheless the election did register a sharp and significant shift in the Israeli body politic.

Tzipi Livni managed to hold Kadima together and lose only one seat, against expectations, even managing to beat Likud by one seat. For the first time in Israeli political history, a strong centrist party has actually lasted for more than one election; this is a personal achievement of great note and possibly the harbinger of a long-term structural change of major significance. But having said that, the real import of the election was the clear victory of the right.

Only in 2003 have the right and religious parties, as a bloc, achieved such success; in essence, the 2009 election has erased the impact of the 2006 election that followed Ariel Sharon’s defection from Likud and the establishment of Kadima. We are back in 2003, when the second intifada produced the most hawkish Knesset ever. Israel’s turn to the right is a long-term development set in motion by the second intifada, the rise of Hamas as the pivotal Palestinian player, the intrusion of Iran, and what is seen by many Israelis as the failure of unilateral disengagement in Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. In this context, the 2006 election was a transitory fluke.

In 2006, center and left parties won 70 seats, while right and religious parties held the remaining 50. Now the center and left are reduced to 55, including 11 seats held by Arab parties, while right and religious parties hold a combined 65. The Jewish left was devastated, dropping from 24 seats to 16, as many of its voters moved rightward to Kadima, replacing voters who moved rightward from that party back to Likud, their original home. Thus Kadima maintained its strength while Likud more than doubled its numbers.

Religious parties considered separately did not actually gain; ultra-orthodox (haredi) parties lost a couple of seats, while the remnant of the old National Religious Party appeared in a new guise as “The Jewish Home” and emerged with only three seats. For the first time in Israel’s history, the religious camp in the Knesset will be dominated almost entirely by the haredim; the national religious camp, long a fixture of the Israeli scene, has practically disappeared.

The other winner on the right, apart from Likud, is Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, which has outgrown its Soviet immigrant base and has managed to attract a growing clientele with its unique mixture of secularism and a new model of hawkishness based more on ethnicity than on territoriality. This is not the old right wing of “Eretz Yisrael Hashlema” (The Entire Land of Israel); Lieberman is ready to reduce the Arab presence in Israel not only by surrendering Arab population centers on the West Bank and Gaza, but even by ceding Arab-inhabited areas of Israel itself.

Israel’s turn to the right does not mean the end of the two-state solution as the dominant model for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Apart from Lieberman’s heterodoxy, Likud’s platform neither endorses nor rules out a two-state solution, but simply condemns any further unilateral withdrawals on the model of Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005. Thus the differences between the parties are less far-reaching than differences that have sometimes existed between parties joined in the same government. Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu can therefore pursue his announced goal of a National Unity government, knowing that in any event there will not be serious peace negotiations over basic final status issues so long as there as no unified Palestinian negotiator in control of all Palestinian territories and able to implement a final agreement.

For the same reason, the formation of a government dominated by the right, with or without Kadima as a junior partner, will not stir up any untoward clashes with the new U.S. administration. With no serious peace talks in the offing, efforts will focus on stability and conflict management rather than a final resolution. A hawkish Israeli government can still work on strengthening the viability of the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority, and otherwise working toward the day when Hamas can no longer cast an effective veto over an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And in any event, all Israeli parties as well as the United States are likely to be more focused in the near future on the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

4 Responses to “Inconclusive election in Israel? Not at all”

Alan Dowty is spot-on in his analysis. I would only add that Lieberman has to make a major choice. Heretofore, as Alan noted, Lieberman has sought to serve his mostly Russian constituents. Where Lieberman’s predecessor, Natan Sharansky of the Yisrael B’Aliyah Party, went wrong was when he tried to play too much of a national role and neglected his Russian constituency. The end result was that his party withered and died, joining Likud as a faction in 2003. Lieberman has national ambitions; indeed, a tongue-in-cheek analysis in today’s Financial Times by Gideon Rachman predicts he will become Israel’s prime minister in 2011. The key to watch is whether, in his efforts to move his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, from a primarily Russian party to a national one, he too will neglect his Russian constituency. What will be required is a tough secularist position, which will also be popular among old Shinui voters, as well as continued attention to the economic and cultural challenges facing Israel’s Russian community.

If he can do these things, as well as maintain a tough nationalist position against Israel’s Arab community whose loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state can indeed be questioned (see, for example, the Israeli Arab “future vision” of December 2006 as well as the behavior of Israeli Arab MK’s during the wars of 2006 and 2008-09), he has a real chance of building a mainstream party, while solidifying his Russian base.

Unfortunately, Alan Dowty is propagating an instant myth that has become too widespread and accepted—that Israel has suddenly shifted to the right. In actual fact, with the exception of the catastrophic collapse of the Likud in 2006, between 1977 and 2003, the Likud and its religious and secular political allies garnered between 59 and 69 seats during each election. Thus, when seen in historical terms, the 65 seats won this time can only be registered as an average success.

Another important fact that has to be taken into consideration is that Israelis are deprived of the right to have blank ballots counted. In a country that has suffered under serially dysfunctional coalition governments for decades, this is a form of true democratic deprivation; and Israelis have been forced to look elsewhere for redress. They do so by abstaining from voting or by casting ballots for minor parties.

In general, now that ideology is no longer a major political consideration for voters, many if not most Israelis vote against parties, rather than for them. Over the years, protest votes given to minor parties have made up 8-12 percent of the ballots cast. Virtually each election has seen the sudden rise of a minor protest party—only for it to become defunct within a relatively short time because it no longer serves a purpose as a depository for protest votes. Dash, Tehiya, Tsomet, Shinui, the Center Party, the Pensioners Party—even the newly-founded Meretz in 1992—all played this role. Thus, Lieberman’s garnering of an additional 4 seats this time also fits an established pattern.

Moreover, the manner in which the campaign was conducted this time had a potent effect on the results. Netanyahu refused to debate any issue and turned the ballot into a personality contest with Livni: “Tzipi or Bibi.” Labor, preoccupied with promoting Barak as the next defense minister, essentially went along with Netanyahu’s strategy. That closed off any opportunity Meretz had of fulfilling its traditional role as a propagator of issues for debate.

And one should not forget that one of the outcomes of both the operation in Gaza and the shut-off in debate was a shift in voting patterns. Once it became clear, after the cease-fire was declared, that the rocket attacks had not been stopped, voters living near both the Gaza and Northern border, who had been subject to rocket attacks, shifted their votes to Lieberman and the Likud. This trend was reinforced in the North after the Jewish voters there witnessed huge Arab rallies protesting against the fighting in Gaza.

Interestingly, two other examples of protest voting have also been almost totally ignored. Hadash was strengthened this time by disgruntled Meretz and former Green Party voters who cast their ballots specifically for the increasingly-popular, alternative spokesman for the left, Dov Kheinin. In addition, a poll by the Arabic-language Panorama Magazine taken less than a week before the polling predicted a huge drop in Arab turnout at the polls, to only 46 percent of the eligible Israeli Arab voters—largely because of a campaign by Arab political radicals to boycott the balloting. However, the number of Arab ballots cast actually rose as a protest against Lieberman’s increasing strength.

Jim Lederman says that I have propagated the “instant myth… that Israel has suddenly shifted to the right.” But a major point in my analysis was precisely that the 2009 election was a return to a previous pattern: “we are back in 2003.” Like Lederman, I interpret the 2006 election as the exception, labeling it as “a transitory fluke.”

I would, however, argue with the suggestion that the right/religious majority is a normal state of affairs stretching back to 1977. Israeli politics has had more variation than that. In the four elections from 1977 to 1988, the right and religious parties together won from 60 to 65 seats, but in the 1990s this dropped to 59 in 1992, 57 in 1996, and 54 in 1999. The total then jumped to 69 seats in 2003, the all-time high point of right/religious representation, and now remains (apart from the 2006 fluke) in the same vicinity, with 65 seats. It is eminently reasonable to see this as a significant shift to the right in the present decade as a whole (i. e., not “sudden”), attributable to the developments that I outlined.

Regarding Alan Dowty’s recent post on Israel’s supposed rightward drift, one should not call the two current religious parties right-wing as such. They represent the interests of their communities. Their goal is to maximize the resources—money and jobs—they get. They may go with left-of-center governments that offer them enough. At times, Shas has taken dovish stands. I am aware that Shas endorsed Netanyahu before the election to ensure no voters defected to him, but their voters are pretty loyal, and if Shas decided to go into a Livni-led government (if she had had a bigger margin) they would support it. Note that when the National Religious Party became a single-issue pro-settler party instead of the defender of “Modern Orthodoxy” (or what we would call national-religious interests) it fell apart. Moreover, Likud has moved toward the center. The moving-to-the-right thesis may obsess the media—in part because of their agenda of trying to prove Israelis are against peace or at least make peace impossible—but it is not true.